ABSOLVE: The Dark Horse Chapter 2: Chapter One — Sente , Part 2

Read chapter 2 of ABSOLVE: The Dark Horse by Joker on NovelPedia.

The friend answered the second stone the way a man swats a fly that has already bitten him — late, and mostly for dignity. "This is a funeral," he said. "You're aware of that. You're carrying flowers into a cemetery. I've had these stones in the bank for an hour." "Mm." Shen Huang played the third stone. Not at the top. Low on the right, at the boundary of White's biggest territory, a quiet diagonal touch that looked like nothing, that looked like a lost tourist asking directions. The friend's hand stopped over his bowl. He saw it then. Shen Huang watched him see it — watched the eyes flick top, right, top again, watched the ledger open and the entries start to squirm. The top group Black kept feeding was not a group. It was a tax . Every stone White spent collecting it was a stone that did not arrive on the right side, where the tourist had quietly sat down inside twenty-two points of settled territory and begun, with the third stone, to build a house. "No," the friend said, mostly to the board. "You have to take them," Shen Huang said, gently, the way you tell a child the dog has died. "Eight stones now. You've spent an hour's interest on them. Decline, and the top comes apart and you lose by six. Accept, and you spend three more moves burying my dead, and I spend those three moves here." He touched the right side with one finger, barely, like checking whether paint had dried. "Your money. Count it again." The friend counted again. Rain. The moth hit the window, twice. Somewhere below in the wet street a scooter went past with a sound like tearing cloth. "Han Feizi," the friend said at last, conversationally, though something underneath the voice had gone tight, "says the ruler who displays his desires is lost. That the wise minister feeds those desires and steers the state through them." He took the dead stones off the board one at a time, each capture the click of a key turning in a lock he was on the wrong side of. "You built a desire into my position. You've been building it for forty moves." "Longer." "You lost those stones on purpose in the middle game." Not a question. The friend's voice had arrived somewhere between outrage and a kind of terrible professional delight. "The knight's move at sixty-two. The one I called slack." "You did call it slack." Shen Huang played the pincer. The right side began, formally, to die. "It hurt my feelings." "You don't have feelings. You have a queue." But the friend was leaning over the board now, both elbows down, all pretense of accountancy gone, playing for his life in the last place on the board where a life could still be made. And this was the thing about him, the thing that had kept nineteen years of Tuesdays alive: cornered, ledger burning, faith in the transcript notwithstanding — the man could fight . White cut where the cut was hardest to find. White threatened a ko that did not quite exist yet and dared Black to prove it. For ten moves the right side screamed. It wasn't enough. They both knew the shape of not-enough; they had traded it back and forth for two decades. The house stood. Counting it now — and they were both counting it, silently, continuously, the way sharks breathe — Black led by two. The friend sat back. Looked at the position for a long moment with an expression Shen Huang had seen on him exactly a handful of times in nineteen years, and never once across a dinner table or a hospital bed or a eulogy. Only here. Only over the board. Respect, wearing the mask of disgust. "Say the thing," the friend said wearily. "You've been holding it since the touch. You get one philosopher per crisis and you haven't spent Camus. Go on. I know you know I know." "Camus says we must imagine Sisyphus happy." "Because the struggle itself fills a man's heart. Yes. And?" "And nothing." Shen Huang lifted the teapot, found it cold, poured anyway. "That's the whole blasphemy. The gods built a perfect deterministic machine — the boulder always rolls back, the outcome is fixed, the t